News Round-up: February Week 1

Irish council worker has a 'paddy' over 'racist' joke - source

A 79 year old chancellor and a council has been forced to pay thousands in damages to a colleague after telling an Irish joke. If he was that offended by the joke then suing him isn't the answer - the SLC offers loans to anyone who wants to go in to full-time education. On a serious note... how anyone can be offended by something so trivial is beyond me, and for a council to lose thousands of much needed money over the issue is insane.

"Googles speech to speech technology you work reasonably well in recent years" - source

... is the result of a re-translation (English > French > English) of "Googles speech-to-speech technology will work reasonably well in a few years", which says in itself that it still has a long way to go. Though I am a Google fanboy... it will take a long time to be perfect, but they can already to speech to text and text to speech, so all they need now is to be able to understand everyone's accents/dialects and have better translations.

One of Britians best companies turns to the dark (chocolate) side - source

This was going to be a much, much longer blog rant... but why bother? Cadburys have accepted the deal with Kraft. Less more for Britain, and as soon as they can do it without facing too many court battles - less jobs.

Miss Harman, or should I say Miss 'Occupant of the Har', wastes times - source

Harriet Harman is backing a ban on the word 'chairman' and is supporting a proposal to instead force people to refer to it as 'Occupant of the chair'. Apparently her or the rest of the parlamentary committee hasn't noticed they still have quite a bit of work to do.

Indonesian president offended over being called a buffalo - source

Awwww.